TITLE: Her Days, Dipped as if in Karo Syrup
AUTHOR: David Stoddard-Hunt
CATEGORY: S, A, R
KEYWORDS: M/S
RATING: PG (disturbing imagery)
REFERENCES: Requiem through This Is Not Happening
SUMMARY: Pre-partum depression.
ARCHIVE: Ephemeral/Gossamer, ok. Others sure, with permission.
DISCLAIMER: CC left 'em lying around. I'll put them back where
he'll be able to find them.
FEEDBACK: dmstoddardhunt@yahoo.com
WEBSITE: http://www.geocities.com/mattersofbelief
NOTE: Thanks to Paige for letting me read aloud to her.
*********************************************
Scully has had this waking dream for weeks. There's nothing she
can do to prevent its onset, nor stop it from running its course.
She's sitting at a computer in the bullpen staring at a blue
screen, when there is a disturbance several rows over and down.
Looking up slowly, she sees Mulder running, glancing over his
shoulder. No, not running. Fleeing. She peers down the aisle
behind him but sees no one in pursuit. He passes her without
acknowledgment, terror stricken but determined to escape. Just
then, she sees an agent rise from his computer, turn and draw a
bead on Mulder. She can control the pace of this action, speed
them both up, slow them down, but she cannot shout a warning in
time. The gun discharges and she dives to catch the bullets in
flight, any way she can, but misses, watching them fly by just
out of reach before she lands painfully on the floor.
When she recovers, Skinner is standing over her, annoyance plain
on his face. In one hand, he is balancing a gun, the murder weapon,
on a pencil slipped through its trigger guard. With the other, he
is helping her to her feet. She tries to ask him about Mulder,
and he stares at her, incredulous. Scully's gaze is drawn down
thickly, swimming through corn syrup to the ruined carpet.
"They'll never get that out. It's coming out of my pay, I know it."
In the midst of all of it, Mulder, silent, alert and calmly
accusatory as his life pools beneath and around him. There is no
explanation demanded, no histrionics. Only: "You did this." She
wants to demur, to scream a denial, but she cannot. There hasn't
been time. There has never been time.
The gelatinous air holds her in place an endless, excruciating
moment.
"You did this to me."
And she knows it's true.
**********************
Her days are no longer her own. They are given over to things
that have recently accreted to her: guilt, concern, absence. None
of which she has asked for, none of which she can shake. Skinner's
guilt, her mother's concern. Mulder's absence, over all.
Mulder, her constant no longer.
Nausea is her constant, now.
She wishes it was more of a passing acquaintance, limited to
'morning' sickness only. Instead, it skulks in all the corners
of her day, waiting for her to rise from a chair too quickly, or
to decide that she actually has the stomach for a piece of fruit.
Every so often, she'll presuppose its arrival and force it out of
her body. She admits this to no one, though, in fairness, it feels
as if she has no one to tell. Scully dismisses as absurd the
thought that she might be trying to purge something or someone else
from her system.
She's tried to claim the nausea as a 'friend,' a positive, a
sign of the impending life inside. Impending life is better than
the alternative, she tells herself, the only ameliorative to her
loss. But it's all crap, pop-psychology and she knows it. Empty
platitudes, serving only to reinforce a vision of the bleakness
before her - she and the baby, alone, without.
Scully catalogs the moments before Mulder's disappearance,
tracking them through Skinner's eyes, the cadence of his voice
providing the color, his tone the underlying emotion. It is her
daily disaffirmation. She embraces it mainly because she cannot
prevent it.
There, up ahead, Mulder moving quickly, unconcerned with stealth.
He must sense that they're close. But, to what? Skinner moves to
catch up, and Scully is there with him, fighting the underbrush,
losing sight of her partner for an instant, no more. Ahead now,
a shimmering form - "Mulder?" - steps forward into a crack of
light and vanishes.
There is a slow, unwinding moment; stupefaction while ordered
worlds, hers, Skinner's, come unstuck.
Then, brilliance hot on the backs of his eyes blinding her even
at second sight. The darkness that follows is indelible, and the
silence profound. Disbelief dissolves in the following moments,
realigning into the knowledge that they have failed him. It is
the nearest thing to acceptance either one of them can manage.
Mulder has been taken, stolen right out from underneath them.
He is lost.
At this point, regularly, Scully gives way to her new constant,
hoping merely to reach the basin in time, to be spared the
humiliation, to be spared something, anything at all.
**********************
The laws of physics are warping around her. No energy is conserved,
no matter. Only used and replaced, scattershot. Her personal gravity
has been will be is being shifted, altered. Reformed.
In her mind, the exchange of energy between the partners has
always been uneven. His nervous, surging passion arcing around
her, kinetic, never at rest, pulling her along and gathering her
in. They have epitomized, so she believes, the Second Law of
Thermodynamics - heat always flows from a higher temperature to
a lower one; and the reverse is impossible. Now that he is gone,
she may never be disabused of this notion. Mulder is the star
around which she has become an enraptured comet, her orbit ever
tightening. And now, star vanished, a gravity well threatens to
drag her deep into the void, extinguishing her fire.
Weighted against this, a single fertilized ovum, tiny in size
and titanic in its import. Where none could had should be, this one
is. A charmed particle presaging a new and ever expanding universe.
She fears that one is nature's balance for the loss of the other.
She is not ready, or willing to make that exchange.
Her emotions oscillate wildly. The very blood in her veins surges
and slows, surges and slows, surges and stops. Anger blooms
outward from her in all directions, eventually collapsing in on
itself. Back in upon her. Anger is sustaining, something which
will not leave her, a steady pulse where, before, there was none.
A kind, inquisitive stranger, his badge twisted around untidily.
Asking whether anyone really ever knew Mulder. "Yes, damnit!" she
thinks after the fact, "I did." But she isn't one hundred percent
certain. Bitterly, she believes she should be. Her anger tilts
inward, saved at the last by the image of a cupful of water, water
he'd offered her, heading for his face in time lapse, frame by
frame, until it connects with the bridge of his nose. Time snaps
forward as it washes away his sneer. She sees herself turning
on heel and is suffused with satisfaction.
She does know Mulder. She, alone in this world, knows Mulder. She
alone knows where he is, has the slightest idea of what he's going
through. She alone understands. She alone can rescue him.
She, alone.
That's fine, she thinks grimly. They've always been alone against
the universe. This isn't so different. Except that, this time, it
isn't two alone, but one. And the universe has gotten aggressive.
She's angry with all those who bump through the house of life
with eyes closed, expecting its furniture to be orderly and in
place. This life is fractured and disorderly, better to accept
that sooner than later. Nothing human falls 200 feet off a cliff
and scampers away unscathed. Therefore it couldn't have been
Mulder; Mulder is nothing if not human. And yet, there they
stand - Doggett's team, staring head-long, blinking at the truth,
refusing to see.
Scully recognizes in them an avatar of her former self, from a
bygone life. The connection lashes her self-loathing, froths it
into a towering rage. She holds it as a matter of personal pride
that she has the ability to control, even to harness such a
violent swirling in the service of something constructive. In
this, she, too, blinks and refuses to see. The reality is that
she suppresses emotion, squeezing it as a vein of coal is
compressed by the ages, transmuted into something many faceted,
impenetrable and quite nearly flawless.
Alone in a desert, no vehicle, no aid of any kind. To anyone but
Scully, this would be the stuff of nightmare. Indeed, the odds
against her are dreadful. Mulder's captors can change form, can
incapacitate, overpower at will. As she continues to search based
on little more than gut instinct, she's oddly comforted by the
fact that what she seeks is, by definition, beyond human
perception. This eases her frustration and tames the edgy voice
that mocks from her shoulder, "Mulder would know where to look.
You're not Mulder."
She has been where he is, confused, helpless, clutching at fading
hope. This, of all things, is the thought that terrifies her,
and drives her the hardest.
Light pins her in place as an insect tacked to a board of
sandstone dross. Scully feels no fear; only resignation and,
strangely enough, relief. The light vectors toward her, with
purpose but obscure intent.
Slowly. She cannot look away. Slowly. Time enough to free
associate - a star, from Jacob come forth, draws nigh to
Bethlehem, slouches toward, blinding her, what rude beast?
From there it is an incredibly short leap to crucifixion,
terrible visions of torture, premonitions of Mulder.
The beat of rotor blades from just behind the glare is a
crushing disappointment. Absurdly, she feels betrayed by those
she seeks, those who hold Mulder. Her rage erupts anew.
Anger is become her new life-force. She can barely see beyond
its frayed, red edges.
**********************
Scully's esteem for her mother, never dull, has taken on new
luster in recent days, something approaching marvel.
Ahab had the five inch guns and thick armor plating of a Spruance
class destroyer around him at sea, as well as the Sargasso calm
that comes over any seaman when facing a threat head-on.
Maggie had no such bulwark around her, nor the immediacy of
combat to sharpen her focus or steel her nerve. And yet, like
other Navy spouses, she found the emotional fortitude necessary
to raise four children virtually on her own; created strength
under the ever-present specter that, on any given mission, the
source of her own strength might not return.
In her career at the Bureau, Scully has given thanks on many
occasions that this acquired characteristic has been passed from
mother to daughter. She wonders about its flexibility, whether
it can be adapted to her unique circumstance. Whether her
emotional reserve is as great as her mother's, or whether her
situation is simply so stressful as to have exhausted it?
Scully knows that her mother's patience, though great, is not
infinitely elastic. It can and will be overtaxed by concern for
her child. This is a burden upon Scully for many reasons, the
greatest of which she dares not even voice. She has shown
precious little concern for her own child, yet to be born.
She realizes that she needs her mother's support, her mother's
comfort desperately. Rationally, she knows that Maggie will
ultimately give her whatever space she needs. And, finally, she
knows that she has no one else.
Help is as close as a phone, and there are many at her disposal.
Her cell phone she avoids, lest she accidentally hit number one
on the speed dial. She will answer her cell when called, but has
not dialed out in weeks. From where she sits, she can see all but
one of the three phones in her apartment, and that one, on the
nightstand by her bed, has remained unplugged since her release
from the hospital. There is a new phone on her desk, bought along
with the laptop to replace the computer that Mulder... the one
that was stolen.
The third phone hangs forlornly in the kitchen. To its right is
a patch of wall more brightly hued than anywhere else in the
room, only recently exposed. The cork message board that had
occupied the space is now stowed out of sight, in a high cabinet
above the refrigerator. She can't bear the feelings that arise
when she sees it; worse, she can't bear the thought of throwing
it out. It has become more memorial than memo, with each neatly
inked number marking the passage of lives: "Mom and Dad,"
"Missy," and, near the bottom, written the night, a lifetime ago,
that she'd first returned from Bellefleur, "Fox Mulder." It could
almost be another person, this "Fox." So different from the
"Mulder" she's come to know, the "Mulder" whom, when she turns,
Scully fully expects to bump into, so completely has he filled
her space.
That she hesitates, has to think to dial her mother's number,
brings a punishing wave of guilt over top of her. She nearly
disconnects. But at the last, she grips the side of the cradle,
leaving the connection open. She stares at her hand, revolted,
as if it bears a will other than her own.
With each ring, she searches for the right thing to say, the
single sentence that will explain it all, that which, as yet,
she barely comprehends. Her mother's voice spans the ether.
It's a kind voice, soft and familiar. And it is something more -
it is the pick that cracks the dam.
"Mom?" Scully begins to sob, her fear welling up with every
hopeless notion she's tried to suppress. It is more than enough
to make a mother's heart catch in her throat. Maggie arrives at
Scully's apartment within the hour, prepared to stay as long or
as short as her daughter might need.
**********************
In her lowest moments, she doubts her connection with Mulder.
The only thing it has ever been consistently is chaotic. Their
most intimate moments have been borne out of anguish - abduction,
infertility, madness, near-death experiences. The norm for them
has always been far from normal. She craves normal. What would
have happened to their relationship if ever she'd gotten what
she craves? In the rare moments of calm they've shared, it's been
companionable, only slightly forced. Recently, they've approached
something more. In Los Angeles, they'd even had what might
conceivably be called a date. In her lowest moments, and they
are not few, she doubts whether it might conceivably be called
anything more than that.
Even from the depths, one observation is inescapable. He is the
center of her life. She is his. Was. His. Whether this is a
product of circumstance or kismet, Scully has always been
reluctant to find out.
He doesn't finish the ends of her sentences, though he often
anticipates what she's likely thinking. It's annoying, not
romantic. When they first met, there were no trumpet fanfares
or cherub choruses signaling The One True Thing. She recalls
feeling something closer to "this might not be as bad as I
thought."
In sum, it hasn't been bad. Far from it. It just hasn't had
the ribbons and bows, the cards and flowers, all the Hallmark
hallmarks. And she's always believed that, when love happened
for her, it most assuredly would.
She admires Mulder's brilliance, basks in his appreciation for
her own keen mind. He infuriates her, as she does him. He's no
more attractive than some she's known, yet she's constantly aware
of him, even when he's not in her presence but merely nearby.
As difficult as he can be, self-centered and illogical, she
simply cannot be without him. In his absence, her life no longer
functions quite right. It's a phenomenon worthy of study, if she
ever finds the time to spare on such frivolous things. She often
catches him staring at her and covering up quickly when caught.
She wonders whether this is proof that the same condition besets
him. She believes so, but may never be sure. And it has been a
long time since belief alone has carried her.
With Mulder, nothing is ever quite normal, mundane, usual. Theirs
is certainly not the stuff of classic romance. It all comes down to
this. Simply put, he has become part of the air she breathes. How
she has managed to survive all of these weeks without air is beyond
comprehension. She should be gasping, choking for the lack of him.
And yet, she goes on, driven by the cruelly tantalizing hope that
she'll find him; she will find him.
Scully can't put a feeling to all of this. She supposes it's love.
Or, rather, it was.
From the sofa where Scully sits, her focus telescopes outward,
taking in the parenting magazine on her coffee table, the desk
beyond, the blinking light denoting another phone message from
her mother that she hasn't the stomach to return. Up, through
the bay window and out into a golden, sun-stippled day. A
late-summer's day. Without. The escape route from her apartment
is right behind her, mere feet away; the latch to open the window
closer still. And yet, she stays rooted to the couch.
Scully watches through the glass, as if it were television.
People walking, playing, living lives unaware and unaffected.
It's the theater of the absurd. From where Scully sits, Summer's
rapture feels impossibly distant.
**********************
Doggett and batmen and slugs, oh my. Doggett and batmen and
slugs, oh my!
She realizes that her mother is only trying to help, though
help with what isn't exactly clear. Her life is sufficiently
surreal that Scully believes she should be exempt from events
such as this. Mom means well. Repeating that has not stopped
her from gritting her teeth.
A friend from high school, two from college with whom she'd
long ago lost touch. Scattered into the mix are several of her
mother's friends whom Scully knows by name and
By reputation. He wrote a monograph on serial killers, which
helped catch Monte Propps in Nineteen eighty-eight. We had a
nickname for him at the Academy. "Spooky" Mulder.
Scully stares at the smiling amalgam in horror. She has the
energy neither to put them in the know, nor to strangle them
in their ignorance. She just wishes they would stop their
damned grinning.
"Just come, darling," her mother had said. "It will be good for
you. To get out of your apartment, I mean," she'd added hastily.
"It's all very casual. Not a party or a shower or anything like
that, Dana. More of a get-together."
More of an inquisition. Give her Jana Cassidy, even D.D. Kersh,
for Pete's sake, and she would acquit herself ably. But, this?
"So, Dana. Is there a guy in your life?"
"Anyone special?"
Scully has been in agony throughout.
"Oh, come on! There's something going on, I can tell. What
aren't you telling us?"
Quite a bit, she thinks sourly.
Doggett and batmen and slugs, oh my! Doggett and batmen and
slugs, oh my.
Several times, her mother has seemed to wince at the merciless
probing, giving rise to hope that things might draw to a quick
end. When Maggie waves her into the kitchen, Scully follows
gladly.
"Dana, you could at least try to look like you're enjoying
yourself. These are your friends, after all. They do mean well.
They only want to help, you know."
On some level, Scully knows this is so. It is with good reason
she refuses the offer. Scully fears there just may be no help
for her.
Doggett and batmen and slugs, oh my. Doggett and batmen and slugs.
**********************
She's spending more and more time in the field, at ever
increasing personal risk. If she cannot find Mulder, then perhaps
she can become him. Skinner makes allowances and Doggett marshals
his suspicions, but neither approaches the truth.
The explanation is more intricately woven than can be untangled
simply, embedded more deeply than can be incised with even the
surest scalpel. It hides in the shadows of what she does not say,
and disappears on the winds of what she refuses to do.
The polished steel and glass of the morgue has become a
battlefield of memory, in which she has contested and risked,
contested and lost. Glass shards rain down around her even now,
testament to the true extent of her power, and she cringes,
convulsing in tears.
The reaction persists, a muscular reflex, involuntary and
haphazard of stimulus. Amidst magazines and the smiles of other
expectant mothers in the cheery waiting area, the shivering
comes over her, even though her rational mind whispers then
shouts that, surely, Doctor Parenti will do her no harm. And
yet, it will not stop.
**********************
From the depths of night, fears surface with astonishing speed.
Waking in a cold sweat, she seeks out an unlikely shoulder.
Skinner. Together they stare up into the heavens, searching for
Mulder as children seek Orion's belt. The stars seem to move
farther and farther away every moment she looks. She hopes, she
wishes, she prays for his return.
Later, she will recall the cautionary tale her father would
recite on occasion, but only when she was safe in her bed and
he by her side. A frightening story of pain and grief, and the
promise of a talisman, a gruesome monkey's paw, with the power
to raise the mourned dead.
Now, however, its moral is lost amid the white noise and the
chaos, under the staggering reality of her hopes and her future
lying dead at her feet.
Now, the stars are falling down around her. One, in particular,
hovers over the compound like a fox choosing its moment to steal
away with its prize, her talisman, one with the power to raise
the returned dead.
**********************
Memories as she runs. Of the evening her father died, and the
days to follow: She is swimming over her kitchen table, swimming
through the deep, green air. Her father sits in the arm chair
where she last saw him, no that isn't right, said goodbye at the
door, but there he is in the chair, in the thick green murk, his
mouth opening, closing, opening like a guppy. She knows that the
case happened in Raleigh, three hundred miles away, yet she
watches it all from her table at the bottom of the sea. The
bullet meant for Mulder, surely in these depths it will be slowed
enough for him to dive away in time.
Skinner is with her, this go 'round. He was not their supervisor
then; maybe now he will be of help. She reaches back, why is she
reaching back? She wants to talk to him, to Boggs, no, to
Jeremiah Smith before his execution. He can find Mulder, he can
lead her to him. If she could only go backward in time.
The stages of grief. Five are the stages. "Dabda," she remembers.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression. Acceptance.
Never. Never accept, she will never accept it. He cannot be
lost to her. Mulder cannot be gone. There must be another
explanation. This is not happening.
She sinks, sinks to her knees and beyond. Sinks through the
murky depths, the glutinous green, swimming down, chasing the
bullet on its slow, inexorable path to Mulder. He is far below
and ahead of her, looking over his shoulder, terrified, sensing
the threat, desperately fleeing and losing, losing, losing ground.
He cannot see her, but he must know she is there, that she is
trying. She will dive until her lungs are bursting, follow the
trail of bubbles through the thick, green depths, because any
other action is unthinkable. She is his only hope. She must stop
this bullet, catch it before it reaches him. And so she plummets
down. After the bubbles, into the depths. She plummets.
-end-